Reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions, said David Hume, but by adding “ought to be,” I think he spoiled his argument, which was that, in the last analysis, moral judgment is not a matter of rationality. After all, what cannot be otherwise than it is, is not a proper subject of ...

I will say this for the coronavirus, that it has caused the prices of hotel rooms in London to fall precipitously. Normally when I stay there, I have to put up in semi-sleazy hotels in degentrified quarters of the city, but recently I was able, thanks to the coronavirus, to stay somewhere more ...

Someone—having reached the age of forgetfulness, I forget who—said to me a few weeks ago that the first sign of socialism is a shortage of toilet paper. This humble commodity then becomes a matter of political privilege, accessible only to those with some kind of favorable connection to ...

I have long thought that if it were not for complaint, we should have very little to talk about. Complaint is like crime in the theories of the first real sociologist, Émile Durkheim: It is the glue of society. Without opposition to crime, society would fall apart. Without complaint, most of us ...

If racists are those who obsessively see human life through the lens of race, there are few more racist organizations than the Arts Council of England. According to the Guardian newspaper, itself thoroughly racist according to the above definition, the Arts Council is threatening to cut off ...

Is changing one’s mind a sign of strength or of weakness? It depends on the circumstances. There are people who are at the mercy of the last person who spoke or who can be turned like a pancake by the feeblest sophist argument. There are others who are so attached to their own views that they ...

A British court has just ruled that a couple accused of procuring the murder of a boy age 11 in India, whose life they had insured for a large sum of money, could not be extradited to India to face trial because they might, if found guilty, be sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of ...

The guilty flee when no man pursueth, says Proverbs, but it does not follow from this that the guilty do not flee when they are indeed pursued. The guilty also have a tendency to argue when they know that they are in the wrong, as for example architects who continue to deny that, for the past ...

It is not necessary for a government to be thoroughgoingly despotic for us to live in a totalitarian condition in which we are afraid to say some things and—what is even worse—are required to say others. In such a condition, we are obliged to deny what we believe and assent to what we do not ...

There was a very curious letter to the editor in the latest edition of the English monthly magazine The Critic. It was from a correspondent who defended the type of architecture known as brutalist, that is to say of buildings constructed of and faced with large blocks of raw concrete. The letter ...